Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today I will learn how to dive.
“Bother”, said Pooh. “Eeyore, ready two photon torpedoes and lock phasers with the Heffalump. Piglet, meet me in transporter room three.”
— Probably Stolen From Nancy Buttons. Most of my other sigs are.
I incautiously sent my son an email with this sig line. I have now been requested to write a story about it.
See, I’m on my way to becoming the next Neil Gaiman. I get writing prompts from my kids. (Oh, let me have my fantasy, dammit).
Okay, the title of this post is a lie. It doesn’t really.
But today I had the pleasure of pulling out something from At the Foot of the Throne to show my son that was relevant to his schoolwork.
For social studies, he must draw a map of the route he walks to his school from home. His first attempt was most certainly a first draft — as a first draft oughta be! I took one look at it, winced and used Gmaps Pedometer to map out the route, so he’d have a clearer idea of what it looks like, and told him to draw his map from that guideline. (The point of the exercise is legends, labels and scale, so I don’t think it’s cheating).
He had used up the graph paper he had on his first draft and asked me if I had any more.
I’m a fantasy writer. Yes, I have graph paper! How else do I…
draw maps?
I pulled out my At the Foot of the Throne notebook, and opened it up to get the graph paper, but I also showed him this:
I can’t show this in the size and detail1 that will make it easy for you to read it or understand it, but since he was learning about cartography in school, I asked him to read the legend and explain about the two countries. He did pick up right away that one was stronger in mineral wealth than the other, and that other had lots of farmland, but didn’t necessarily pick up on the political significance of such a fact.
I was kinda hoping he’d ask to take the map to show to his class to show about geopolitic… But he didn’t. Ahhh, vanity.
Still, it was nice to have the mapmaking tools right on hand for him so that he can do a good job for school.
1 For those of you who think that the map looks suspiciously like a Civilization II game, it’s because I used the same algorithms. I was stuck on creating the two countries, and my partner of the time handed me an appletini and advised me to, “Play Civ on paper.” It worked very well indeed!
My son is an odd duck.
Whenever we have a meal with chicken with the bones in (roasted whole chicken, Mama was too cheap to buy boneless, skinless chicken breasts, you name it), he requests that dinner the next day is garbage soup.
Garbage soup is not actually a specific meal. What I do is toss the bones of the old meal and any leftover meat into a pot of water and let it simmer most of the day to make a rich stock. Then about 20 minutes before dinner, I strain out the bones, pick out the meat, toss that into the pot and start getting creative with whatever I have in the fridge and pantry that wants eating up. Carrots, potatoes that need eating, ginger, garlic, onion, you name it. Then I season it however I get a wild hare across my butt to do so. Sometimes it has pasta in, sometimes rice.
This is a meal we usually have while watching some science fiction show. (Mama’s been on an Andromeda kick lately. Bless Netflix for its regular delivery of Tyr!)
While the frugality of it pleases me, I find it amusing my son is so fond of the dish.
Being a writer is a lot like making garbage soup. You’re taking the leftovers of life and turning it into a nourishing, savory dish. It’s such a frugal thing, saving the dribs and drabs of what you see around you — the little throw-away moments of life, and recycling it into something to feed the soul.
Writer’s Block is often only a failure of nerve, but don’t let that bother you.
I did something foolish last night and went back to re-read what I’ve been doing from the beginning.
“Now how can re-reading your writing be foolish?” I hear you ask. Or would if I could hear what people not even in my house are saying when the air conditioner’s white noise interferes with me being able to hear my son…
Sorry.
We were talking about foolish, weren’t we?
The writing method I use is basically to go hammer and tongs at the first draft until it is done — not bothering to re-read more than yesterday’s work to get my mind in gear. I do this because without a first draft to rip apart and edit, you’re kind of screwed.
I found myself wanting to tweak stuff here, add a scene there… all the crap I knew I’d be tempted to do and would prevent me from that lovely -30- which means I can sit on it then go back and edit.
I did resist. (Aren’t you proud). And now I’ve got to put all that stuff out of my mind to finish That Damned Book.
Yeah, it’s That Damned Book again. I’ll love it later. Not now.
Sent out a couple of queries to At the Foot of the Throne to agents today.
I always feel a little anxious when I send these things out, though mostly not. I’ve a fine collection of rejection slips, so it’s not a huge deal to me.
People say you need a thick skin to break into writing. I don’t necessarily know that’s so in the early stages. A pre-printed rejection form doesn’t have the zing, I think, that a detailed analysis of why you suck would. While a novice in the industry, I know the detailed analysis means you’re getting close, so I’m not so sure that would get to me all that much!
I often wonder how I’ll deal with the “yes”. I mean, the rejection forms? I’ve gotten plenty. But critics? That, I’ve never dealt with — or at least not much. Wearing my other hat as a polyamory activist, and writing a weekly column, I do get people who disagree with my stuff all the time. I cheer that, to be honest. It means people are reading it, thinking about it and reacting. I mean, sure, I get the occasional feedback that makes me grind my teeth a little.
How’s that gonna be with a published book? No idea. I’m often curious how the pros react. <grin>
I just wrote a synopsis for At the Foot of the Throne1. Since I’m trying to find an agent, of course, the first thing in my mind is, “Will this be interesting, entertaining and make the sound of a cash register ding in the back of the mind of the agent reading this?”
We all know that 15% of nothing is nothing, so you gotta make it marketable. Miss Snark used to say that good writing trumps everything. She’s right, of course, but I think that the “good writing” has to be in the sales pitch, too.
I’m too keenly aware of my own inexperience in this, too. On the one hand, I am a writer, an artiste. I create Great Art, dammit!2
But the creative person is also an entrepreneur — or needs to be if he doesn’t want The Dreaded Day Job. Oh, I love to write. I fall in love with my characters, I growl when something Just Doesn’t Soar. The creative process… Well, it’s fun and glorious and so very glowingly alive. Nothing in the world like it.
Where I think a lot of creative people fall down in trying to make a living at it (and me too), is that we forget that we have a great product — something people want. That experience of being alive with the heart soaring up and down in the leaps and dives of the ocean of consciousness? You help people feel that. That’s worth a lot. What a wonderful thing to be able to give when you can.
Don’t be modest or reticent about it — get the people with the printing presses and the distribution systems excited, too! We all need it.
1And by the way you guys do realize that the working title usually doesn’t wind up being the sales title, right?
2 Or at least try to…
I feel like I am chickening out a bit.
I’ve been having a hard time making my word count. Part of it is that I don’t start writing until nine at night. Now, by then, I’m tired.
Lotta people with day jobs who are morning people1 will get in their word counts the second they get home from work, and not emerge from their creative caves until they get their writing done.
I did that on my last book, but my living situation was a little different — for one, I had more time with my kids than I do now. I’ve been saving my writing time for after nine in the evening because of this.
I have several options. I could choose to write 500 words a day. That’s an easy word count to make, let me tell you!2 I could go back to hitting the word processor the second I get home, doing my word count, then socializing!
If I cut back to 500 words a day, I don’t get my first draft done until sometime in February. My original schedule had me done in late October/early November. If forcing myself to meet the more intense goals meant I was writing crap, though, I’d be cutting back and screw how long it takes. Thing is, when I’m forcing myself to write, I write better. It goes against a lot of fluffybunny “writer advice”. Funny thing is, I don’t see the professionals I actually read giving it. <snerk> Which is really my answer, innit?
1 And oh, God, am I a morning person!
2 I seem to recall it was James Michener’s daily word quota, and he seemed to do all right in the prolific department, I think.
I don’t know how many people who read this write on a regular basis or have specific writing goals. I can say that because I do have a production schedule I don’t always feel inspired when I write. Oh, sometimes I do, and it’s glorious. I love it. Those moments are genuinely the reason why I write because it’s so very good. Nothing is good always and all the time. Sometimes, I get stuck. These are things I do when I’m feeling uninspired.
What sorts of things do you find useful to keep you motivated on your projects?
“Oh, I’ll write that novel when I get the time.”
This actually makes me grind my teeth a little. Not because I think everyone in the world needs to write a novel. Hell, probably all novelists don’t need to be writin’ ’em, if you know what I mean. (Yes, yes, possibly me among them, so hush!)
Like anything important, though, you don’t find time to do it. You make time.
I didn’t always. I’d write when the Spirit moved me, and often it was good stuff — fun vignettes with interesting quirkiness or a tasty idea.
What I never do, unless I have a production schedule, is complete a novel.
At the Foot of the Throne was not actually the first novel I ever completed. The first was one called To Ride a Black Dragon (not fantasy — it was a contemporary piece) back in 1994. It was crap and unpublishable because there were points about plot and pacing I did not understand, but I did finish a novel, by golly.1 At the time I was not working full time, so I had a 10,000 word a week goal for myself. Doable if that’s all you’re doing, which in my case, it was.
These days it’s 1,000 words a day, but I don’t take weekends off, so you’re still looking at a 7,000 word week.
I’ve had people question the idea of just getting the work out like that. My reason for doing it is simple. When I have a challenging word count goal, I finish the first draft. I have something to edit and work with.
And at 1,000 words a day, you find yourself making time to do a little writing here, or a little writing there. Can you write 100 words while waiting for the water to boil for pasta? What about waiting for the bus?2
I used to have a writin’ ritual to get myself into the creative “mood”. I’d get up, have breakfast, make myself a latte, turn on a specific series of CDs and then settle down to write. The problem was that if, say, my then husband stayed home from work, or I didn’t have the equipment for a latte or something, the ritual was spoiled and it would throw me off my writing mood.
I stopped doing that and decided that as Frank Herbert so quaintly put it, “Mood is a thing for cattle or loveplay.” The goal, a finished product, was the important thing, so screw mood. Just write.
I’ve read more than one interview with journalists who turned to writing fiction who said that the deadlines and the pressure to put out copy were excellent training for the writing of fiction. With my own self-imposed deadlines, I’m inclined to agree.
1 It’s also salvageable, so it’s possible that I’ll go back and edit it pretty heavily, or even do a re-write, after Stoneflower.
2If you think that’s absurd, I promise you that if you go to a writer’s convention, you will find people who find weirder places to write than a bus stop!
A big problem I have when I’m working on a first draft is weight gain. I tend not to be as fitness-oriented when I’m hammer and tongs at a first draft. You know how it is, your mind is on the book, and you’ve got a million other things to get done. The last thing you want to do is take time out to work out.
I’m actually really bad about it. I’ve not been working out like I should.
Thing is, if I’m going to have a sedentary profession, I really, really need to make sure my physical needs are taken care of. After all, you do think more clearly when your body is healthy. It’s the brain that’s the important thing as a writer, right?
I do have a pool membership and have decided to store my bathing suit in my locker there so that I have No Damn Excuse not to get my lazy butt into the pool on my lunch break and get all red in the face good and proper!
While I do have an Otterbox and waterproof earphones, I’m laying off using them in favor of using the time face down in the water to work on Stoneflower, getting my brain in gear for the night’s writing. I figure it’s a decent moving meditation. When I was a kid, I would often plot stories while riding my bike around Kennedy’s Pond, then beg permission to go out into the woods behind my best friend’s house where I’d soak my feet in the stream and actually write the story. (Oh god, if only I’d had a laptop or my Palm and keyboard then! I never did much like writing longhand).
I know of lots of writers who like to walk, and often use the time to work out stories in their minds as they do so.
I also like weights because I’m lazy. It doesn’t take very long with a pair of dumbbells to get in a decent strength-building workout. Heinlein, if I recall correctly, liked to do stone mason type work around the house to keep in shape, but still often bitched about the fact it was easy to get out of shape while working on a novel.
It’s rough, sometimes. What I really want to do is to park my butt in my writin’ chair with an appletini to get my writing done. What I really need to do is make sure I eat right and work out so that my body supports that brain I need for work. I ain’t slender and I’m naturally pretty sedentary. A serious writing project makes it that much worse!
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